Sessions
Disrupting the Norm: Innovative Approaches for the Work Ahead
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM Thu
Marientina Gotsis, MFA is Professor of Practice at the Interactive Media & Games Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She has a broad background in arts, design and engineering and founded the USC’s Games for Health Initiative since 2007, connecting health professionals with innovation in various forms of interactive media. She is co-founder and director of the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center, an organized research unit between the School of Cinematic Arts and the Keck School of Medicine (est. 2010). This center designs, develops and evaluates entertainment applications at the intersection of behavioral science, medicine, and public health. In 2015, the center launched two specialized degree programs in media arts, games and health. Her teams have developed interactive experiences and products to help increase literacy and public awareness, change behavior, and improve assessment and treatment techniques with support from federal, foundation, and corporate sponsorship. She is the inventor of The Brain Architecture Game, a tabletop game for teaching the science of early childhood, played by thousands of people around the world. Gotsis has lectured about her research and practice at Apple and Karten Design, presented findings at ACM, IEEE and HCI journals and conferences, as well as medical and public health meetings and publications. She has been an invited think-tank participant at the White House, the Institute for The Future and various NIH/NSF/EU-funded workshops. Most recently, she was awarded a Niarchos/Fulbright Greek Diaspora Fellowship to design and evaluate narrative medicine and cinematic arts in medical education curricula in collaboration with Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She has maintained a professional consulting practice in design and information technology innovation since 1995.